Sixteen US states, including New York and California, sued President Donald Trump’s administration Monday over his decision to declare a national emergency to fund a wall on the southern border with Mexico, saying the move violated the constitution.
Moreover, several Republican senators have decried the emergency declaration, saying it establishes a dangerous precedent and amounts to executive overreach.
“The only national emergency is the president’s trafficking in lies and deceit,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement earlier Monday.
The litigation, brought before a federal trial court in the Northern District of California, seeks an injunction to prevent Trump from shifting billions of dollars from military construction to the border without explicit congressional approval.
The suit also asks a court to declare Trump’s actions illegal, arguing that Trump showed a “flagrant disregard of fundamental separation of powers principles engrained in the United States Constitution” by violating the Constitution’s Presentment and Appropriations Clauses, which govern federal spending.
The complaint added that the Department of Homeland Security had violated the National Environmental Policy Act by failing to evaluate the environmental impact of the wall in California and New Mexico.
Trump said on Friday that he would bypass Congress by declaring a national emergency to build a border wall along the nation’s southern border, after a protracted battle in which Congress has repeatedly declined to give the president billions to build border barriers.
Friday’s declaration enables the president to divert funds from the Pentagon’s military construction budget and other sources.